Kairos (work in progress)

I haven't written for a few weeks now. As I write the closing chapter and begin rewriting previous sections, everything feels both more distant and more immediate. The working title has only continued to feel more and more resonant, both during the writing and during my pause.

When I started this project, I referencing Zion from The Matrix. Our narratives omit or obscure the collective work that makes “hero” stories possible. I went on to challenge even the modality of the hero narrative as reactionary in and of itself. As the genocide in Gaza continued to escalate, writing about the process of “building Zion,” through referencing an Afrofuturist influence in The Matrix, could not be separated from the genocidal settler colonial Zionism of Israel.

While looking for a new title, I finished Dawn of Everything. The book both begins and ends with “Kairos”: translatable in various ways, but used here to mean essentially “the right thing at the opportune time.

We are at a time of great war, a clash of civilizations, when ideological lineages, pitted against each other for thousands of years, will finally end their conflict through the annihilation of the barbarians or the collapse of civilization. Or, at least, so the story goes. It's a powerful story, but it's bullshit.

As the mask continues to slip off the face of the old order, it has never been more clear that we are, in fact, fighting for the survival complex human society. But it is not the “Civilization vs the Barbarians” we have been sold for so long. No, it is a fight between the fossil fuel industry and humanity, between capitalism and life on Earth. There has never been a more important time to forge a planetary identity.

The oligarch attempt to yoke us all with AI is a last gasp at saving a dead world. Even as their datacenters burn fossil fuels, some oligarchs do recognize the age of oil will end. The only question is if humanity survives that end. Isolated humans can't survive, but cooperating humans are a threat. If they can only trap us alone, with only the virtual companions they control, they can ultimately control us. If they can make us dependent on their machines, perhaps they can give up oil. If only…

It is important to recognize that the billionaires, the feudalists, the political class, the power structure, is not a unified group of super humans. They are people, flawed and confused, grasping for a future they can understand and control. Humans generally resist change, especially when that change means losing power or status. There is no Illuminati, no “deep state” (at least, none as imagined by conspiracy theorists). Even with all the money, all the power, the people dictating our laws and bending the economic system to their will are just that: people.

They have been caught by the AI con too. They are rubes. There is no future for this world. The question is not if it will die, but how soon and what shape the new world will take that emerges from the collapse. They imagine being saved by a great consciousness, a super-being that gathers the wisdom of all humanity into something greater than any intellect that has come before.

Now I say the thing that will surprise you. They may not be wrong about that. They're wrong about the mechanism, for sure, but I do think there is a more powerful consciousness developing now. In some ways it's already here.

The Gaia Paradigm proposes that the Earth should be thought of as a single collective organism. Strip away the billions of organisms in our bodies (in our gut, on our skin) and we die. Animals are already generally multi-organism organisms. Why should we restrict our thinking, why should we set an arbitrary boundary, around where life stops being collections? Anyone who bothered to stay awake in a primary school biology class, or who has paid attention to any environmental anything in the last few decades, should be well acquainted with a “keystone species.”

Just like individuals, ecosystems can be killed. They are complex systems where the interactions of individuals produces something more complex than the sum of their parts. Why should we not think of them as organisms? And if we can accept ecosystems as organisms, then why not a whole planet? As we talk about “climate tipping points” it's hard not to realize how interconnected various systems are. The metaphor of rain forest as “the lungs of the Earth” betrays a deeper understanding of our fundamental connection.

The behavior of human systems feels intentional. It can be hard to shake the feeling of intentionality in the the complex systems of oppression, appropriation of anti-capitalist iconography into the capitalist market, the very use of symbolism from a movie about gender being used to reinforce cis-hetro patriarchy. It's hard not to see the entire system struggling to save itself, as though it were aware of what was happening.

And also, it's possible to see similar emergent behavior. Ants are not individually smart enough to circumvent human attempts to keep them out, and yet as a colony their behavior is far more complex than individuals have the capacity to produce. Simple interactions produce complex coordination. There is an emergent intelligence. Capitalism, as a simple system, also produces such complex behaviors.

And what is any animal's intelligence but these same simple systems? Neurons following simple rules of input and output, of reorganization based on predefined behavior, manifests a complexity far beyond the scope of what we can understand from these basic levels. Capitalism is a type of intelligence. It is, in fact, that very intelligence we have been warned about: the world killing AI.

There is an “AI apocalypse” scenario is sometimes described as “the paper clip problem.” A super-intelligent AI is told to maximize the number of paper clips it produces. So it hijacks all the world's resources to produce paper clips. It kills everyone to stop them from preventing it from expanding, and it uses the iron in their blood to make more paper clips. An incorrect objective leads to the annihilation of all life on Earth (and possibly the universe).

But we already have that. The fitness function of capitalism has already trapped humans into a system where we are exterminating ourselves. Through capitalism, we are the apocalyptic AI we have been promised.

But capitalism, for all it's emergent intelligence, is not self-aware. It is not a conscious entity. But Gaia can be.

When we create systems together, we can choose the fitness functions that guide us. We can use our intelligence to change our objectives if they don't fit our needs. We can build something different: a super intelligence that serves humans and the planet, rather than one that enslaves and exploits us all.

A long time ago, perhaps millions of years, the configuration of the brain of one of our ancestors changed. Instead of simply acting off of stimuli, it developed a model. That model allowed it to plan and predict. At some point that model came to include itself. The first “self” on Earth emerged.

If we look back at history, the present can seem hopeless. The challenges we face are, as popular as that word has become, “unprecedented.” And yet, there are always firsts. Just as environmental pressures lead to the evolution of the first “self,” so could this time lead to the first self-aware collective self.

Like those early neurons, shifting and linking together to form that very first identity, so are you in a position to do the same. And, perhaps, as you read this, you are changing. Perhaps your brain is reorganizing itself, adapting this information, and planning how to build the social connections needed to realize this new global consciousness. Perhaps you are, like your ancestors before, becoming the awareness of something unique and incredible. Perhaps, with these words, you are becoming Gaia.

Perhaps this is our kairos.